The net reloaded

By Kim Krieger

IT WAS the late 1990s, and a group of physicists had it all figured out. A universal rule seemed to explain a vast range of behaviours in social, biological and computer networks. Everything from how ecosystems evolve to how the internet works seemed to follow the same statistical pattern, called a “power law”. What came as a surprise was that this simple law implied a deep underlying principle for all these networks.

Researchers began working with power-law models of the internet and other systems – and that’s when they made a startling observation. If their models were correct, eliminating the most highly connected computers would cripple data flow. Their work appeared to show that the internet and systems like it had an “Achilles heel”, and that contrary to popular belief a few carefully targeted attacks could bring down the entire network. The finding spawned a whole branch of research known

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